About me

I have been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2006 and a lecturer in political science at Yale University since 2014.

Before I joined The Atlantic, I spent two years as a courier and aircraft loader in Iraq. I have also been a contributing editor to The New Republic and books editor of Pacific Standard, in addition to freelancing prolifically for many other newspapers and magazines. My first job was as a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh in 1999.

I was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow (2015-2016) at the Council on Foreign Relations and am now a member of the Council. In 2017, I was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have received fellowships from the South Asian Journalists Association (2009), the East-West Center (2009-2010), and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide (2013-2014). I was the screenwriter of a Sundance Official Selection (2010, short film), and led a Nazi-hunting expeditions to Paraguay for History Channel specials in 2009 and 2016.

I attended Deep Springs College, then transferred to study philosophy and African-American studies at Harvard University. I studied Central Asian languages at Indiana University in Bloomington on a fellowship from the Social Sciences Research Council, and spent a year studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo. My Kevin Bacon number is 2 and my Erdős number is 3.

Follow me on Twitter: @gcaw.